“The figure of this champion of a universal Church and freedom from the law of ordinances” must have been already known to the Church. What was new was the association with his name of an epistolary literature, the production of which occupied a series of earnest and able men for some forty years. In the Acts of the Apostles Paul is co-ordinated with or subordinated to Peter, the representative of the Judaeo-Roman hierarchic tendency. That reflects the issue of the struggle. The freedom-loving party was defeated; in the last quarter of the second century Catholicism became supreme in the Church. No attention was paid to Bauer, and in part he himself was responsible for the neglect. The bitterness and the [pg 123] carelessness of his writing, the contradictions in which he becomes involved, the fantastic imagination which he allows to run riot, made it impossible for the few who read him to regard him seriously. Nevertheless, in detached observations, and in some of the incidental ideas, he displays a critical acumen which has something great about it. After dismissing him with a few sharp words, the Tübingen school and their successors enjoyed a respite of thirty years, so far as radical scepticism was concerned. At the end of that time Bauer reappeared, like a _Nero Redivivus,_ in peaceful Holland._(_90_)_ In a critical introduction to his study of the Sermon on the Mount, Allard Pierson examined the earliest witnesses for the existence of Christianity, and in doing so threw out the question whether the historicity of the main Pauline epistles was so completely raised above all doubt that they could be treated with perfect confidence as archives from the earliest period of the new faith._(_91_)_ In the year 1886 he published, in association with the philological scholar, Samuel Adrian Naber, the _Verisimilia._ The book was not adapted to make a deep impression. It was too much the ingenious essay for that. The two friends combined their efforts in order to show New Testament exegetes how much they had left unexplained in the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans, and how many problems, incoherencies, and contradictions appear when one reads these writings with an open mind._(_92_)_ [pg 124] But instead of making a thorough examination of the problems and laboriously arguing the case with the other students of Paulinism, the authors at once proceed to suggest what appears to them a possible solution. They claim to have discovered that the inconsistencies are due in the main to the presence of two strata of thought which have been worked together. The one is of a sharply anti-Jewish character; the other consists of milder and more conciliatory ideas.